“Think three moves ahead!” and “Remember what Napoleon said: ‘Offense is the best defense,’” Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist brother of Rahm and Ari Emanuel, recalls their father admonishing over family chess games. “These games reinforced our natural tendency to be aggressive in whatever we set out to do.” In a Vanity Fair adaptation from his forthcoming memoir, the eldest Emanuel son writes about the childhood that accounted for three phenomenally successful brothers, each with his own special talent.

“Ari really could not help but be annoying,” Ezekiel writes. To provoke their father, he would scan the menu at every restaurant to identify the most expensive things and order them all, a habit Ezekiel attributes to his dyslexia. “He had trouble reading menus, and he found it easier just to look for the higher prices, which he anticipated were associated with the better dishes.” The pressure exerted by their demanding parents was especially hard on the youngest brother, who had a hard time at school. “While other kids wrote out letters, Ari struggled to translate what he saw on the blackboard to the paper on his desk,” Ezekiel writes. “‘Dog’ became *‘bog’*and ‘boy’ became ‘yod.’” Ari fell behind his brothers and his classmates. “Eventually he began to fear that his inability to read was caused by a character defect or a basic lack of intelligence,” Ezekiel writes. “He did not share these feelings openly. In fact, he buried them so deeply that they came out only in bursts of aggression or anger.”

“He was always awake by five A.M. Jittery and anxious, he could not stay in bed, and he would prowl around the house looking for something to occupy his mind and help him burn off excess energy,” Ezekiel writes of Ari. “To his credit, our father understood that Ari was just too energized to control himself. But he was less sanguine as Ari grew older and learned the ﬁne art of persistent and intentional irritation.”

Ezekiel describes incidents that might be called child neglect today. When Rahm was a baby, their mother left him momentarily in the care of two-year-old Ezekiel and a five-year-old cousin before leaving the room. When the boys were children, she sent them off alone to spend summer days on Chicago’s Foster Avenue Beach, which they reached through a tunnel beneath Lake Shore Drive. After a few days in the sun Ari and Rahm could pass for African-Americans, which led to the occasional dustup on a beach that was segregated in custom and practice. “Certain people—mostly white males between the ages of 10 and 15—made it their business to enforce the unwritten whites-only rule,” Ezekiel writes. “When they called my brothers niggers and tried to bully us off the beach, we—naturally—refused to move. Instead, one of us would answer, ‘You can’t make me leave.’” If shouting didn’t work, the Emanuel boys had no qualms about throwing punches. “We were city kids, not anti-war activists.”

At the end of a day like that, the three would settle into the room they shared to go over the day’s events. After saying a few words, Ezekiel writes, Ari would fall asleep holding on to a favorite blanket that he kept well into grade school. He and Rahm might stay up a little later playing catch with a stuffed elephant. “As the elephant ﬂew across the room, Rahm might say something like ‘Weren’t you afraid those guys were going to kill us?’ Tossing it back, I would confess my fears but also repeat what our parents had taught us: ‘You can’t run away. If you do, then you’ll be more scared the next time.’”

According to Ezekiel, Rahm resented being compared with his straight-A-student older brother, and he was determined to ﬁnd a way to succeed on his own terms. He found it through his love of dance, which he discovered when their mother signed all three boys up for introductory ballet. Rahm’s passion also provided an opportunity for Ari to work out his aggressions: “Once, Ari chased a boy down the sidewalk and beat him until he cried for mercy after he asked if we had remembered to bring our tutus,” Ezekiel writes. He continued to defend Rahm from “the knuckleheads” as he continued at the barre long after his brothers had quit.

“Rahm was quiet and observant, while Ari was forceful, rambunctious, highly social, and hyperactive, and did more moving than talking,” Ezekiel writes. “Ari was, in everyone’s eyes, the best-looking of the brothers, a child so cute he could break a window or a lamp and get away with it, ﬂashing his mischievous smile, which said, ‘You can’t possibly stay angry at me, can you?’ Loud and physically fearless, Ari walked and talked early in order to keep up with his big brothers, and plunged into life with boundless energy and courage.” Ezekiel recalls that, as a toddler, pacifier in mouth, Ari greeted one of their mother’s friends with the question: “Onna ﬁght?”

“Hands seem to be our family’s Achilles’ heel,” Ezekiel writes. He describes the cut Rahm sustained while working at an Arby’s that eventually caused part of one of his fingers to be amputated and an earlier incident when Rahm badly injured two fingers when a huge oaken door was slammed on his hand. Two of Ari’s fingertips were sliced almost completely off when he and Rahm wrestled over a can of mixed nuts in the backseat of their father’s car. They drove to the hospital, where their father, a pediatrician, repaired them himself.

The three remain close. Ezekiel writes, “As adults we are constantly checking in with one another by e-mail and phone. It’s not unusual for us to talk four or ﬁve times in a week. Indeed, going a whole week without connecting causes us to worry that something bad has happened.”